Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If utopia is a perfect place or at least the best possible social arrangement, it must be a very dull place where any change is a change for worse and not for better, where nothing can be new and good at the same time. There can be no conflict in…
Christians, even those who say much about ‘incarnational’ faith, can say surprisingly little about the way that God claims our bodies . Perhaps this is most striking in treatments of baptism, where the intensely bodily character of the rite would especially seem to invite comment. Even if the term ‘baptism’…
Dear Pastor, I believe the locus of the difference between us is your statement here: "There are mothers who choose to risk their lives and even die to preserve the fetus, there are those who wouldn't. There are the circumstances of the individual, family, income, community, illness, risk factors, etc..…
New Year’s resolutions for weight loss are practically on the liturgical calendar of America. Somewhere around the beginning of a new year, people resolve that they will get in better shape. Some are made to feel guilty by the obesity police in our country (whose standards are, many times, very…
Click HERE for Part 1 After sending my letter to the local pastors, I received a long and thoughtful post from one of the local pastors, and it was sent not just to me, but to all of the pastors whom I e-mailed. Unfortunately, I do not feel I can…
Narrative and story have been all the rage in theology for the last few decades. The attractions are obvious. Narrative theologians favor the active, unpredictable, vibrant God of Scripture to the impersonal first principle of philosophical theology. Narrative theologians reject the notion that theologians need to justify their work by…
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A review of Jeffrey Knapp’s Shakespeare’s Tribe in the November 7 TLS begins with the comment that Elizabethan dramatists approached their work with a missionary aim: “Countering the fears of religious commentators who believed acting to be nothing more than hypocrisy, this approach admitted the element of deception in theatre…
An interesting summary of the work of Nobel-prize winner J.M. Coetzee in the December 8 issue of The Weekly Standard . The reviewer, Michael Kochin, suggests that Coetzee, who is both an academic critic and a novelist, poses unique challenges to Western intellectuals, whether postmodern multiculturalists or conservative classicists. Kochin…
Were there Humanist iconoclasts? It seems plausible, given the interest in Platonism and Neoplatonism among Humanists. And here’s a quotation from the Humanist Vives: “If that very picture which we are gazing at, is obscene, does that not contaminate our minds, especially if it be subtly and artistically depicted? Not…
John Donne on Virginity (from Paradoxes and Problemes ): “I call not that Virginity a vertue, which resideth only in the Bodies integrity . . . But I call that Virginity a vertue which is willing and desirous to yeeld it selfe upon honest and lawfull terms, which just reason…
A pastoral similitude, in honor of Jonathan Edwards: What to do with a low-burning fire? Sometimes, additional wood will smother the fire. But sometimes additional wood is just what the fire needs to revive. So, when zeal is running at a low ebb, we should not necessarily remove burdens until…
The November 21 TLS has a review of a biography of Nicolaus Steno (1638-86), a Danish physician, theologian, and convert to Roman Catholicism who was beatified in 1988. The reviewer gives this account of Steno’s contribution to medicine: “Between 1663 and 1665, he discovered the cheek salivary duct, identified female…
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